Abstract
Every social setting is a collective of bodies, and each participating body observes their arrangement as a certain setting. Bodies can be collected in a social setting only becauseeach of them observes and experiences their collective in a certain way, and, at the same time, they can observe the setting as such because they are collected in a certain way. The participating bodies know this “reflexivity, ” as Garfinkel calls it, and use it to arrange themselves such that the setting can be organized as a meaningful one. This paper attempts to describe how this is achieved cooperatively by the participant bodies, analyzing audiovisually recorded fragments of some experimental psychotherapy sessions. Through critically examining Goffman's concepts of participation and Scheflen's and Kendon's approaches to communicative behavior, an attempt is made to show how it is that an arrangement of bodies has a “structure, ” in Merleau-Ponty's sense, from the viewpoint of ethnomethodologically oriented conversation analysis.
